Why We Need NASA To Fix Its Problems And Lead America To Money-Making Opportunities in Outer Space

A bunch of tech wonks and nerds issued a report last week that provided a shockingly accurate conclusion about NASA’s Strategic Plan: it’s vague, generic, and there’s no national consensus for taxpayer support. Now it’s time for the agency to look beyond its comfy fishbowl of geeks and contractors to fix its problem.

No, it’s been time for many years, and the Committee on NASA's Strategic Direction said as much. NASA was hatched from a handful of bureaucracies in the late 1950s to get Americans into space faster than the Soviets, and the first Moon landing in 1969 completed that mission brilliantly. Our eyes have glazed over since then, unless things have gone wrong with its shuttles, the ISS, and various unmanned probes nominally launched in the pursuit of science, but really investments in keeping itself in business.

It takes skill to turn the Ultimate Adventure into a bureaucratic afterthought.

Exploration didn’t used to be so boring. Monarchs and consortia of the rich or foolhardy have been putting up money for voyages of discovery since the beginning of time, though by “discovery” they meant “discover profits.” It’s how the New World was explored and exploited, and it enabled the Westward expansion of the United States. Sure, scientists tagged along on many of the gigs, but the governments were foremost interested in making money.

It's how the exploration business works: governments pave the way (with knowledge gained through building roads, rail, and ships) and then the rest of us literally jump on the, er, bandwagon. This bringing together of national and individual lust for wealth has been the engine of exploration for all of history.

It's how it has worked here since President Jefferson sent Lewis & Clark into the wilderness to find a waterway to ship goods. Eisenhower’s national highway system made possible everything from transporting fresh produce to the social mobility of suburban living. The Defense Department gave us what would become the Internet.

NASA has given us billions of dollars in expenditure on stuff we either don’t know or care about. Satellites help me text and watch VOD, but satellites were getting thrown into orbit before President Kennedy announced we were going to the Moon. Miniaturized electronics are a nice Apollo Program offshoot, but byproducts aren't the same thing as named deliverables.

What needs to happen? NASA has to stop talking to itself. The folks on that committee have been drinking the Tang for too long. The agency is the Microsoft of exploration, and it’s time for it to start thinking like Apple and declare big, high/risk and high/reward goals like explorers did in the past, such as:

Start selling rights to develop low orbit commercial opportunities

If there’s stuff worth doing on the Moon, help make it happen

Solve the damn energy problem with solar power from space (duh)

Did you know that last year NASA announced that it would land spacecraft on asteroids and figure out how to go to Mars (Curiosity is already trolling there for the best real estate)? I know, the news was kept practically secret, perhaps in part because nobody bothered to explain why it was so incomprehensibly cool and promising. NASA also unveiled a new heavy-lift rocket design to get people there, and named it...wait for it...SLS. Not Andromeda or New Hope or whatever.

No wonder virtual reality is more enticing to people these days. NASA gives its rockets acronym names like they’re line items in a budget (which they are). Or diseases.

Why are well-intentioned bureaucrats narrating these adventures in reality instead of folks who know how to sell stuff? We marketers know how to get people excited about shoes and smartphone apps. Do we really think that America’s Ultimate Adventure is inherently doomed to be ignored or misunderstood?

The real point isn’t that NASA needs a purpose, it’s that we need NASA. There are few industries and domains that the United States owns, but we own far more of space exploration than we do, say, entertainment. It’s a source of national competitive advantage for us, and no amount of private space tourism shenanigans can take its place. Finding money-making opportunities in outer space is something every American taxpayer could support if we understood why we'd all benefit.

We need NASA to become the engine for getting thousands of other companies, institutions, and individuals involved in space exploration and development. Making money should be the literal currency for achieving that purpose, which will spin-off all the science and social benefits that every other exploration initiative has yielded throughout history.

Everyone knows the problem. The solution is obvious. No more studies or committees.

It’s time to launch.

UPDATE 01.14.13: The latest news about China's agressive space program efforts suggest that the national security rationale for our work hasn't faded? Surprising that we hear so little about it.